Guys. It’s not a secret. Creatives are annoying. Everyone on my team (including and especially me) is super annoying and falls into one of several archetypes.
Numerous creative-focused blogs have written about the sense of ennui and self-loathing that comes with being a creative—our paradoxes, how annoying we are, and our sensitivities, to name only a few.
That’s our reality. But it’s not our doom.
Here’s my hope: To help creative leaders encourage the good and discourage the bad. I’ll introduce specific individual archetypes (whom you might recognize—hi, guys!) and how to work with them to assemble a badass team that balances the crazy with the creative.
THE ARCHETYPES
The Logician
The Logician (Logical Magician)’s singular mission is to eliminate unnecessary layers, exposing the foundational core of a project.
Strengths
The Logician makes coherence of the conceptual.
They will be instrumental in identifying missing or fallacious components and charting a clear course toward the goal. They’ll ensure that you’ve missed no details, you are not building a strawman, and ultimately, you are not allowing any functional aspect left unaddressed.
Logicians excel at not letting the nature of the details confuse them, which is helpful when details are not yet salient. To a Logician, details become subservient to the actual structural aspects of an argument or approach.
Weaknessess
Navigating uncertain territories where logical conclusions and use cases have not been worked through. He or she can become overly reliant on theoretical or structural consistency, often at the cost of what’s practical and relevant to the details.
Powercombo™
Pair with a Pragmatist to counterbalance their overly theoretical approach. The Pragmatist will make sure the details make sense.
The Pragmatist
The Pragmatist is guided more by practical considerations than by ideals. In the creative sphere, this person pushes the theoretical or the conceptual into reality.
Strengths
The Pragmatist translates creative language into business vernacular.
He or she doesn’t let “heads in the clouds” lose sight of real considerations: deadlines, scope, resourcing, etc. A people-shaker and a project-mover, this person keeps the team functioning as a cohesive unit and doesn’t lose sight of the goal.
Weaknessess
The Pragmatist can be too practical for the nebulous nature of creative work. Many great ideas are impractical; to innovate, we have to imagine beyond what and how we’ve done things before. This process can be messy and hard to monitor in the tactical way that the Pragmatist tends to prefer.
Powercombo™
Pair with a Visionary to audit idea generation against what’s practical.
The Narcissist
The Narcissist is the crème de la crème of your team—and yes, they said it like that. Narcissists, at their core, have a heightened sense of self and lack empathy. They’re not really sure what they’re doing here, and you’re not either. They think it’s because they’re too good. You know it’s because they’re not as good as they think.
Strengths
Narcissists function well in situations where checked arrogance pays off, such as pitches or presentations. Because they genuinely believe they are the best, Narcissists present with extreme confidence and engender faith from your prospective client or audience. Narcissists are most effective either working completely in isolation (where their actions can only be a result of themselves) or in a larger, balanced group dynamic. Small, unbalanced teams should be avoided. If the Narcissist can’t be balanced or checked in the ways described, they should go.
Weaknessess
Narcissists feel entitled to better treatment than everyone else, which leads to a certain level of excuse-making and why-me behavior. While they are arrogant and critical of others, they’re extraordinarily sensitive and generally don’t receive feedback well. Narcissists are rarely willing to admit when they are wrong, particularly if you are accusatory in your approach (compli-disses usually work well here). When a Narcissist stumbles, it’s almost always because they were put into a position that forced them to make a mistake or fail to deliver. It is never a Narcissist’s fault.
Powercombo™
A broad, balanced team with at least one person who doesn’t take bullying—like a Pragmatist or a Logician.
Place the Narcissist into team dynamics that do not tolerate their errant behavior—where their behavior is largely disallowed by being ignored—and forces them to collaboratively work through problems. Then encourage the group to navigate their narcissistic tendencies. (HBR’s How to Manage a Narcissist provides helpful recommendations.)
The Droid
The Droid is there to put in a solid day’s work. They find the greatest pleasure in producing as much work as possible in a clear, linear order.
Strengths
Highly efficient and straightforward, The Droid will not overcomplicate rote tasks. They have a high threshold for monotony and being detail-oriented. Their sole mission is to find efficiencies in the repetitive workflow, always seeking to modify core functions to execute them more accurately and more rapidly.
Weaknessess
The ambiguous creative process really has to be nimble in order to produce the best work. It requires key trigger points that depend on the project itself—not on an abstractable and replicable checklist.
The Droid becomes easily mired in details. He or she becomes completely debilitated without a replicable checklist with every single detail buttoned up. Unlike the Logician, the Droid has trouble understanding conceptual consistency if every last detail is not matched.
Powercombo™
Pair with a Pragmatist whenever dealing with a Visionary or Logician. The Pragmatist will make sure the Droid knows whether they can start or not. The Pragmatist will also bluntly tell the Droid when they won’t receive every single cross to a “T” or dot to an “I”, and how to deal.
The Visionary
The Visionary sees the big picture and favors thematic trends over granular details. A conceptual thinker by trade, their intuition guides their logical process.
Strengths
The Visionary can conceive abstract concepts and connect disparate ideas, then guide others who are less conceptual to understand how the vision ties to the execution. The Visionary, at his or her best, can bring the intangible to life.
Weaknessess
The Visionary’s biggest flaw is the number of ideas they generate. This can sometimes overwhelm them and those around them. They can lack focus, leading to multitudinous directions and priorities. The downside to this ability to think conceptually is that those concepts can remain ambiguous, which is harder for literal-minded team members to create. Because they live in the world of aspiration, he or she can sometimes overcommit to unrealistic expectations.
Powercombo™
Pair with a Logician to plan, then a Pragmatist to execute. Both will keep a Visionary on track.
UNDESIRABLE ARCHETYPES
The Evader
The Evader is possibly the most clever of the bunch. They can find many ways to avoid getting the job done—dog ate my homework is for amateurs.
Getting this person to create quality work is an uphill battle. More time is spent discussing why they can’t get the job done (it’s always someone else’s problem) over how they will get it done. As a strain on leadership, this person should probably just be let go.
WARNING: Some Droid behavior can seem like Evader behavior. The difference is that the Droid wants to produce work. The Evader does not.
The Unchecked Narcissist
See above.
You have to understand that Narcissists can’t be fixed or ego-checked (as frustrating as it is and gratifying as it seems). If you can’t work around your Narcissist, it’s probably time to let them go. This is the hardest thing to accept if you’re a principled leader, who believes in exhausting every attempt to restore this person.
The point is: Good creatives often come with baggage. Our job is recognizing who falls where to create a high-functioning team that discourages these weaknesses and encourages strengths.
As leaders, especially, we must recognize where we fall on this spectrum—so teach yourself a bit of self-awareness. If we understand our own crazy/creative makeup and check ourselves on the reg, it makes it harder for our teams to call us out on our bullshit.
As a final note, it isn’t entirely creatives’ faults that we are this way. Much of this “annoyance” is a result of the broken agency model: constant pivots based on client contradictions and catch-22s, micromanaging colleagues who don’t understand our process (or lack thereof), timesheets, and the inherent vagueness of our work.
Our broken model has conditioned us to be the highly irritable, particular, impatient, and demanding creatures we are today.
So while we can continue to work on the flaws of the system through the people, we must ultimately recognize that the system needs to be fixed in order to make the most of these brilliant minds.
Creative Leadership Series
Creative leaders need to discuss the leadership aspects of our jobs more. Instead of learning from just our experiences, how can we cultivate conversations about the work as it pertains to the people? What methods are most effective?
For all of the tools centered around teaching technical skills, creative leaders often lack healthy models of creative leadership. Beyond a few resources (Harvard Business Review, FastCo, 99u, for example), creative leaders are left to learn (or not to learn) the soft skills to develop future creative leaders. On occasion, I’ve had enlightening discussions at events or heard profound speakers—unfortunately, these experiences are exceptions rather than the norm.
I’m not asserting that I am a single-handed expert on creative leadership, but I do hope my experiences and this series initiate more conversations about creative leadership.